- a kind of virtual social intelligence, a reaching out on Group Dynamics and Human Processes at the Workplace ( http://www.workplacecatalysts.com ) .
- Foster a discretionary Presence in Groups, to enable human capability.
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Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Who are We? The Phantomness of 'Self' among other things...

The last I heard a philosopher speak at a public event, was
at Minneapolis in 2005. Peter
Koestenbaum spoke of courage, will, ethics and reality from a business
standpoint. A businessperson’s philosopher, I valued his perspective on guilt
as a product of choice, and man’s essence as a chooser. His treatment of
anxiety as the tunnel of growth left a mark from the relatively diminutive frame
in which such sagely sense embodied itself.

Thomas Metzinger

Last evening I heard a German speak of the Phenomenal-self
model (PSM). Thomas Metzinger
says being a philosopher, he needs to wrestle conventional boundaries of the
discipline as he traverses the neuro-sciences evenas he holds a chair on
Theoretical Philosophy. The contrast for me between Koestenbaum and Metzinger
had already been sharp. Seeking neural
correlates of the conscious self is a venture that modern day observations make
possible through technology like virtual reality and even the relatively inexpensive
$5 magic box of Viliyanur
Ramachandran’s phantom limb fame.

The brain as it turns out from Metzinger’s expositions
yesterday has the capacity for self-deception too. The rubber hand illusion
that constructs for us the sense of ‘ownership’ is one such piece of evidence.
Hence Being
No One is at once illusory and yet real. That robots can be designed to
have a self-consciousness is something that scientists are already working on,
as also constructing extension of this line of experiments via the internet.

Even if George Moore wrote early on the Refutation
of Idealism, the transparency of our perceptions is composite now in the
integrated internal representation of the organism as a whole – in the
Transparent Phenomenal Self-Model. While this took me back immediately to
System 1 and System 2 representations that Kanhemann
talks of in terms of behavioural economics, the thin line between fantasy and
constructionism began to develop meaning for me. Simultaneously, the following
held sway in my mind.

1.Marshall Mcluhan famously
said nobody in the electric age will consider it sane to have a point of view,
as one will pay attention to several aspects at the same time. Is the message
the medium at all?

2.What strange twist of attentional focus that I
chose to look at Andre Beteille from the lens of philosophy itself?

3.When virtual reality constructs images of the
self technologically to confirm or disconfirm workings in the brain,parental
re-imprinting and future
pacing that we engage in NLP seem so much like cousins of the curiosity
family with the connectedness gene.

4.VERE experiments (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic
Re-embodiment) hinge so closely to neuro-ethics, that the bias to watch for may
continue to be a product of the optimism bias. Are researchers in this genre
males, supremely confident of themselves, and held back in advance merely by
the introceptive
anchors in our body?

5.The
phenomenology of Immediacy and Identification or infinite proximity, may
lunge us forward in hedonistic somnambulance, at the cost of reflective
wholesomeness. Philosophy seems to be both urgent and important in this way to
our times.

Like with the nature of paradoxes, the one that really
resonates with me is this – that self-organising systems as may be in our body,
may not have a physical correlate. Yet the self as subjectively experienced, or
as psychologically constructed may contain the following elements :

1.Temporal patterns of neural activity

2.A neuro-biological self

3.A representationalist self

4.An unconscious self (although the relationship
between psyche and soma is not yet clear)

6.An evolutionary self that provides us with a
body model for the self

7.A Functionalist self

Metzinger’s work is both prolific and an invitation in empirical
work to substantiate phenomenal experience. What struck me in the Bangalore audience was
this. Questions were begging points of view from Thomas Metzinger, as in
philosophical propositional logic. Like first-order conversations, while
meaning requires second-order conversation especially if as in Metzinger’s
work, evidence liberates us from convenient biases. There’s a pattern in our
socialisation perhaps, that the arduous aspects of scientific enterprise are
weighed down by a naïve self-understanding of the
self. When in India would we ask questions of science?

Thanks again to the Azim Premji University, that I will now
set my sight on Spirituality
and Intellectual Honesty, one of several tunnels in which I may be right now. In the
meanwhile, let us brace ourselves for the optimism bias of democracy in India,
where again, the supremacy of male over-confidence would hold sway in an
uncritical socialisation of sentiment.